These days, there’s nothing as heartening to a cinephile as seeing a crowd at the theater. After months of hype and social media battles, people actually turned out for Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s The Odyssey — even though Vermont has no theaters offering IMAX, the format in which the film was entirely shot.
On the rainy Saturday of opening weekend, early screenings at Essex Cinemas’ large-format T-Rex Theater were approaching sold-out territory, suggesting that locals prioritized catching this spectacle on the biggest screen possible. Even in the more modest-size theater where I saw it, people applauded as the credits rolled.
The deal
Twenty years ago, Odysseus (Matt Damon) sailed off to attack Troy, leaving behind his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), to look after his kingdom and raise his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Now the Trojan War is long over, but the king still hasn’t returned. Every night, his home is full of suitors for Penelope’s hand, one of whom (Robert Pattinson) tries to persuade Telemachus that a changing of the guard is inevitable. Unconvinced, and encouraged by a faithful servant (John Leguizamo) who insists Odysseus lives, Telemachus sets out in search of news of his father.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the uncharted sea, an exhausted and depressed Odysseus is shacked up with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), who plies him with lotus flowers to help him forget how he lost his entire crew on the way back from Troy. Until he confronts his past, he can’t put himself on the pathway home.
Will you like it?
It’s easy to forget what made Hollywood’s golden-age epics feel epic. Not only were they filmed in large formats and shown on large screens, but they were also shot on location with casts of thousands, creating a visceral sense of scale.
Ever since 2000’s Gladiator, filmmakers have tried to recapture that sense of bigness using CGI crowds on CGI backgrounds. The technology is wizardly, but our brains crave something more — and the proof, I think, is how satisfyingly epic The Odyssey feels.
The locations are real, as is the terrifyingly small warship in which Odysseus and his crew weather the wrath of sea god Poseidon. While the production didn’t eschew digital effects (the monster Scylla, for instance), many of its key marvels were produced practically, including the 8,800-pound Trojan horse and the man-eating Cyclops (played by Bill Irwin with help from puppetry and animatronics).
Nolan reveals the Cyclops gradually, with a horror director’s instinct for withholding. When a giant hand swoops from the darkness of a cave to seize a crewmember, we feel the same primal terror that ancient audiences might have felt listening to bards sing Homer’s poem. Rapper Travis Scott plays such a bard in the film, reminding us that The Odyssey began its life as a thrilling adventure tale performed live.
That’s not to say the passage of millennia doesn’t matter. Nolan’s screenplay reshapes Homer for modern tastes in myriad ways. He keeps the gods off-screen except for Athena (Zendaya), who behaves more like a facet of Odysseus’ psyche than a political player in her own right. This Odysseus struggles with trauma from a war he knows was fought to secure economic advantage, despite the official rationale of reclaiming Helen (Lupita Nyong’o). Flashbacks to the sack of Troy, interspersed through the film, emphasize its wanton brutality. And the witch Circe (a wonderfully sly and quiet performance by Samantha Morton) is on hand to make an explicit connection between that violence and male appetites.
Nolan conveys the Greeks’ cultural unity by having all the actors speak flat, modernized, American-accented dialogue. It’s no poetry, but it does the job. While the star-studded casting can be distracting, and most of the characters are fairly simple archetypes, the performances are strong.
Damon’s Odysseus is a crusty, flawed hero but a hero nonetheless, tormented by fate, the gods and his own choices until he reaffirms his mental and physical prowess and earns a happy-ish ending. Pattinson makes his scheming suitor despicable enough for us to yearn for his comeuppance, and the well-orchestrated battle scenes satisfy our cravings for derring-do.
Yet the movie’s overall mood is elegiac, with several characters invoking the idea that the end of civilization draws nigh. Ludwig Göransson’s score reinforces that anxiety; in place of the expected symphonic grandeur, he uses ancient instruments and synthesizers to create a needling sense of foreboding.
Like so many great powers, the Greeks in this movie fret about an invading other, the “people from the sea,” only to discover the real danger lurks within their own corruptible hearts. The relevance to our current moment is hard to ignore.
Whatever one thinks of Nolan’s take on The Odyssey, he has managed to steer it between the Scylla of fight fests like 300 and the Charybdis of a less rousing, more academic rendering. The record box-office take confirms that audiences still crave larger-than-life stories with life-size concerns at their core. “Go big or go home,” the saying goes, but this Odysseus does both.
If you like this, try…
Jason and the Argonauts (1963; Roku Channel, Tubi, YouTube, rentable): Nolan has said he drew inspiration from Ray Harryhausen’s pioneering stop-motion visual effects for this early Greek mythology spectacle.
The Return (2024; Paramount+, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Ralph Fiennes plays Odysseus and Juliette Binoche is Penelope in this version that removes the monsters and mythology and focuses on the hero’s homecoming.
O Brother, Where Are Thou? (2000; SlingTV, YouTube TV, rentable): Ethan and Joel Coen put their own spin on Homer’s classic with this loose comic rendering set in the 1930s, starring George Clooney as an escaped convict and trickster.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Odyssey”
This article appears in July 22 • 2026.
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